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Abstract
In 1844, the British public learned that the government was secretly opening exiled Young Italy leader Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters and sharing information with continental authorities. For outraged citizens, espionage in that quintessential liberal institution, the reformed British Post Office, appeared un-English, despotic and criminal, the makings of a Gothic plot. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into the sensation novel that occurred with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Attention to the fields of Anglo-Italian studies, mid-Victorian print culture and the development of narrative form in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the historical and political implications of letter-opening for the emergence of a new fictional genre. The Post Office Espionage Scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, producing and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism. The letter-opening scandal reveals a crisis in Victorian liberalism in the political realm and the media, while The Woman in White translates this Victorian crisis of confidence into a literary genre defined by exposing the sordid undercurrents of British society: sensation fiction. Together, the espionage scandal and Collins’s novel respond to and generate a challenge to Victorian complacency that emerged out of the collision of British and Italian politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century.
Notes
1. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4.
2. Manfred Pfister, ‘Introduction: Performing National Identity’, in Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions, ed. by Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), p. 9.
3. See Pratt, p. 10.
4. Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), p. 1.
5. O’Connor, p. 3.
6. See O’Connor, pp. 70–1.
7. See Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 211.
8. See Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, politics and the fiction of letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
9. Kate Thomas, Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 2.
10. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 41.
11. Menke, p. 4.
12. Menke, p. 41.
13. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xii.
14. Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 190.
15. Henry James, ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation, 1.19 (1865), p. 593.
16. James, p. 593.
17. James, p. 593.
18. Lyn Pykett, The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel, 2nd edn (Horndon: Northcote, 2011), p. 8.
19. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-century Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 1.
20. Mighall, pp. 128–9.
21. James, p. 593.
22. In some cases, instalments of The Woman in White quite literally appeared next to articles about Italy. See Henry T. Spicer, ‘Real Horrors of War’, All the Year Round 2.32 (1859), 123–5, in Dickens Journals Online <http://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-ii/page-123.html> [accessed online 2 December 2015].
23. Harry W. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters: Figures of the Risorgimento and Victorian men of Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), p. 126.
24. Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), p. 132.
25. Collins’s close friend Dickens certainly knew Mazzini from 1846 on; he met Mazzini after an imposter used the publicity garnered from the scandal to beg Dickens for money – by letter – in Mazzini’s name. See Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965–2002), 4:485, in Past Masters <http://www.nlx.com/home> [accessed online 30 November 2015].
26. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. by Matthew Sweet (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 201. Subsequent page numbers will appear in parentheses within the text.
27. O’Connor, p. 77.
28. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. by John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 43.
29. Collins, The Moonstone, p. 15.
30. For a discussion of the politics of facial hair in the revolutionary era, see Christopher Oldstone-Moore, ‘The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain’, Victorian Studies 48.1 (2005), 7–34 <https://www.ebscohost.com/academic/mla-international-bibliography> [accessed online 30 November 2011]. Blake’s beard suggests an allegiance to the 1848 revolutions.
31. Collins, The Moonstone, p. 43.
32. Collins, The Moonstone, p. 69.
33. See Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 19–32.
34. Joseph Mazzini, Italy, Austria, and the Pope. A Letter to Sir James Graham, Bart (London, 1845), p. 1, in HathiTrust Digital Library <https://www.hathitrust.org/> [accessed online 16 April 2015].
35. Mazzini, p. 7.
36. Katrien Bollen and Raphael Ingelbien, ‘An Intertext that Counts? Dracula, The Woman in White, and Victorian Imaginations of the Foreign Other’, English Studies 90.4 (2009), 413 <http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/nest20> [accessed online 26 June 2014].
37. Menke, p. 36.
38. Laura Rotunno, Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840–1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 15.
39. Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970), pp. 338–9.
40. Robinson, pp. 348–51.
41. Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 8.
42. Hansard, 3rd ser. 75 Parl. Deb., H. C. (1844), p. 895 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/> [accessed online 16 April 2015].
43. Hansard, 75 Parl. Deb., H. C., p. 899 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/> [accessed online 16 April 2015].
44. Hansard, 75 Parl. Deb., H. C., p. 904, p. 900 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/> [accessed online 16 April 2015].
45. Hansard, 75 Parl. Deb., H. C., p. 902 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/> [accessed online 16 April 2015].
46. Hansard, 75 Parl. Deb., H. C., p. 1,270 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/> [accessed online 15 May 2015].
47. Hansard, 75 Parl. Deb., H. C. p. 895, 899 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/> [accessed online 16 April 2015].
48. Not all publications expressed anger; some opinions fell predictably along party lines. See Maurizio Masetti, ‘The 1844 Post Office Scandal and its Impact on English Public Opinion’, in Exiles, Emigrés, and Intermediaries: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions, ed. by Barbara Schaff (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 203–13.
49. ‘The conversation which took place on Friday’, The Times, 17 June, 1844, p. 4, in The Times Digital Archive <http://gale.cengage.co.uk/times.aspx/> [accessed online 14 April 2015]. See also Mazzini’s friend Thomas Carlyle’s letter to The Times, which presents spying as un-English, criminal, and Gothic (Thomas Carlyle, ‘To the Editor of The Times’, The Times, 19 June, 1844, p. 6, in The Times Digital Archive <http://gale.cengage.co.uk/times.aspx/> [accessed online 25 June 2012]).
50. ‘The conversation which took place on Friday’, p. 4.
51. ‘The conversation which took place on Friday’, p. 4.
52. This is another example of the gaps in public knowledge created by state secrecy. The House of Lords’ Secret Committee concluded that all communications to continental powers were made ‘without the names or details that might expose any individual then residing in the foreign country to which the information was transmitted to danger’ (‘Report from the Secret Committee of the House of Lords relative to the Post Office’, Annual Register, or a View of the History and Politics of the Year 1844, 86 [London, 1845], p. 465, in HathiTrust Digital Library <https://www.hathitrust.org> [accessed 18 January 2017]). Articles in the Westminster Review and North British Review ridiculed this claim: see Antonio Panizzi, ‘Post-Office Espionage’, North British Review 3 (1844), pp. 270–74, in British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.com/products-services/british_periodicals.html> [accessed online 29 October 2015] and W. E. Hickson, ‘Mazzini and the Ethics of Politicians’, Westminster Review 42 (1844), pp. 237–41, in British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.com/products-services/british_periodicals.html> [accessed online 29 October 2015]. Ironically, such failed insurrections were effective public relations tools for Mazzini, shaping his Risorgimento mythology and hagiography (Riall, p. 31).
53. ‘Sir James Graham’s Pupils’, Punch, 31 Aug. 1844, p. 106, in 19th Century UK Periodicals <http://www.gale.com/19th-century-uk-periodicals-series-1/> [accessed online 3 November 2015].
54. ‘The Post-Office Espionage’, Morning Chronicle, 26 Feb. 1845, p. 5, in 19th Century British Newspapers <http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/> [accessed online 3 November 2015].
55. Hansard, 3rd ser., 76 Parl. Deb., H. C. (1844), p. 216, pp. 233–4 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/> [accessed online 22 May 2015].
56. Hansard, 76 Parl. Deb., H. C., p. 216 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/> [accessed online 22 May 2015].
57. Hughes, p. 190.
58. Hughes, p. 190.
59. Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) and Eliza Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (New York: Garland, 1976). Lynn Linton’s husband, Chartist William James Linton, helped uncover the government’s practices against Mazzini (see Thomas, p. 124). For his first-hand account of the scandal, see his autobiography, W. J. Linton, Threescore and Ten Years 1820 to 1890: Recollections (New York, 1894), pp. 50–4, in Internet Archive <https://archive.org/index.php> [accessed online 13 October 2015]. Both Lintons contributed to All the Year Round alongside Collins.
60. Giovanni Ruffini, Doctor Antonio. A Tale. By the Author of Lorenzo Benoni (Edinburgh, 1859), pp. 215–216.
61. See Wilkie Collins, No Name, ed. by Virginia Blain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Wilkie Collins, Armadale, ed. by Catherine Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Collins, The Moonstone. No Name includes close to 115 letters, Armadale features 145, and The Moonstone contains almost 70. No Name and Armadale include fully epistolary sections or chapters, which accounts for the larger number of letters compared to The Woman in White and The Moonstone.
62. These exceptions include No Name’s Captain Wragge, who intercepts Magdalen Vanstone’s letters and forges a letter recalling Mrs Lecount to Zurich (Collins, No Name, pp. 317–21), as well as Armadale’s Lydia Gwilt and Mrs Milroy. Miss Gwilt forges a letter from Mr Blanchard to the elder Allan Armadale’s mother when Miss Blanchard suppresses her father’s letter (Collins, Armadale, p. 26, p. 27). Mrs Milroy reads and re-seals a letter to Miss Gwilt from her confidante Mrs Oldershaw (Collins, Armadale, pp. 306–8).
63. Mariaconcetta Costantini, Francesco Marroni, and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, Preface, in Mariaconcetta Costantini, Francesco Marroni, and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, eds, Letter(s): Functions and Forms of Letter-Writing in Victorian Art and Literature (Rome: Aracne, 2009), p. 9.
64. Rotunno, p. 71.
65. Ann Elizabeth Gaylin, ‘The Madwoman Outside the Attic: Eavesdropping and Narrative Agency in The Woman in White’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43.3 (2001), p. 317 <https://muse.jhu.edu/> [accessed online 27 June 2014].
66. D. A. Miller, ‘Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White’, Representations 14 (1986), p. 116 <http://www.jstor.org/> [accessed online 27 June 2014].
67. Watson, p. 16.
68. Menke, p. 43.
69. ‘Punch’s Complete Letter Writer. Dedication to Sir James Graham Bart Secretary for the Home Department’, Punch, 6 July, 1844, p. 2, in 19th Century UK Periodicals <http://www.gale.com/19th-century-uk-periodicals-series-1/> [accessed online 3 November 2015].
70. Menke, p. 43.
71. ‘Punch’s Complete Letter Writer’, p. 2.
72. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected to the French presidency of the new Second Republic in late 1848. Before his term ended he seized power in an 1851 coup. His authority was confirmed in a plebiscite of December 1851 and a second plebiscite, in November 1852, re-established the French Empire and named him Emperor Napoleon III. The action of The Woman in White occurs between the summers of 1849 and 1852, when the characters return to Limmeridge approximately one year after Count Fosco’s death in summer 1851, corresponding to this period of French history. For details about Napoleon III’s rise to power in this period, see Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 9–37.
73. Richard Cobden, The Three Panics: An Historical Episode (London: Cassell, 1970).
74. Hugh Cunningham, The Volunteer Force: A Social and Political History 1859–1908 (Hamden: Archon, 1975), p. 8, 12.
75. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Napoleon III in Italy’, in Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, iv, ed. by Sandra Donaldson, pp. 556–70.
76. D.G. Rossetti, ‘On the French Liberation of Italy, 1859’, Rossetti Archive <http://www.rossettiarchive.org/> [accessed online 6 September 2016].
77. Price, p. 408.
78. Price, p. 406.
79. See Clyde K. Hyder, ‘Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White’, PMLA, 54.1 (1939), pp. 298–300 <https://www.jstor.org/> [accessed online 28 September 2015].
80. Tamara S. Wagner, ‘Violating Private Papers: Sensational Epistolary and Violence in Victorian Detective Fiction’, Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 3.1 (2009), p. 35 <http://www.wreview.org/index.php/archive/32-vol-3-no-1.html> [accessed online 19 October 2015].
81. Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 8.
82. Heller, p. 131.